The invention relates to an apparatus for applying an additive to tubular knitted fabrics. It is customary to apply these additives to such fabrics after they are bleached and dyed to facilitate the further treatment such as sewing or even to impart characteristics to the fabric such as a soft hand.
This application of additives usually takes place after certain procedures are applied to the tubular or circular knitted fabric. Some of these practices involve extraction of water and straightening and flattening the fabric to reduce as much as possible any wrinkles that have occurred in prior treatments.
Early techniques at removing excess moisture from circular knitted fabrics consisted of treating such fabrics in centrifugal extractors wherein the already tangled fabric suffered even greater wrinkles and deformities. This required drying and straightening by hand in order to prepare for further processing.
New technologies evolved for extracting excessive additives and adding such additives and many of these improvements are still being practiced presently. Some of these techniques are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,548,616, to Frank Catallo et al, 1,893,197 and 3,207,616.
More recent developments for extracting excessive moisture from circular type knitted fabrics consists of ballooning the fabric in a chamber and then passing the ballooned fabric to an extraction nip formed by two rolls adapted to receive the circular knitted fabric.
The fabric as it is wet is also filled with air which has a ballooning affect on same and better prepares the fabric for subsequent treatment.
As will be evident, fabric that is flat, smooth and devoid of wrinkles is desirable for further processing as treatment of same does not require the time consuming wrinkle removal operations. Also the even extraction of additives is facilitated.
However additive application to the ballooning type arrangement presently known by me are cumbersome, costly and inefficient. Some of the arrangements for additive application utilized involved spraying the fabric before extraction. Dipping the fabric is also a technique that has been practiced.
Some of the deficiencies found in such practices are chemical dilution of the additive, added tension of the fabric and the lack of uniform application of the solution.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an additive applying arrangement in a balloon extraction system which is efficient, compact and economical to manufacture and free from the above mentioned deficiencies and others.
Another object of this invention is to utilize the normal extraction rolls of the ballooned fabric type extractor for circular knit fabrics with novel changes to serve as a new and improved additive application system and apparatus.
For a more complete understanding of the invention and other features and advantages thereof reference should be made to the following detailed description of a preferred embodiment and to the accompanying drawings.